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Sunday, October 05, 2014

"There is no question among any of us that education is a
vastly complex system of human conditions and interactions. One needn’t
spend much time observing children in a classroom to understand that the
dynamics of learning go far beyond that day’s particular lesson." according to Theodore H. Wilson, III, Ph.D., is the president and executive
director of the National Institute for Student-Centered Education (NISCE).Rapid
advances in cognitive science allow us to recognize those dynamics and
how they affect children’s learning - or lack thereof.

While
there are many examples of real success, most would agree that decades
of education reform efforts – as evidenced by No Child Left Behind and
Common Core state standards - have produced disappointing and mixed
results. International, racial, and socio-economic achievement gaps
persist. Bullying and school crime statistics are alarming. The
challenges in educating our young people remain daunting.

Massachusetts
Board of Education Chairwoman, Margaret McKenna, has recently put the
spotlight on the ways in which standardized testing is being practiced
in the Commonwealth’s school districts by voicing her concerns that some
schools are testing our students 20 to 25 days per year, including
practice and pretests. She said, "We’ve got to figure out a way to make
sure people are not teaching to the test."

Her
comments were made before the latest MCAS ratings were released by the
state. This year, a number of school districts – some of which
consistently lead in student achievement – dropped from their Level 1
status in the ratings based on strict requirements to show improvement.

McKenna
and others rightly illuminate one consequence of No Child Left Behind (NCLB): the emphasis on proficiency testing, which too often results in
teaching-to-the-test, rather than teaching-to-the-student. These efforts
to quantify education success often leave out the most important person
in the equation – the child. So is it any wonder that students are
disengaged, and that high school dropout rates remain troubling
indicators of that very disengagement?

A 2012
Gallup Student Poll that surveyed 500,000 students from 1,700 public
schools in 37 states found that 60 percent of high school students are
simply not interested in school. According to Brandon Busteed, executive
director of Gallup Education, "Our educational system sends students
and our country’s future over the school cliff every year."Read more...

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About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.